Associating (Part 1)

Saturday morning, while walking the dog, I found this little dead bird on the pavement. I couldn’t help but stop and pick it up to take a closer look. It looked like it had only just crawled out of the egg to fall out of the nest. But it was beautiful, unblemished and everything was so very small and delicate. Underneath the soft and almost transparent skin, the littlest bones were visible. The tiny ribs, the spine, the hip and leg bones, the beginnings of feathers; all perfect and ready to grow, to start a life. The corners of the beak at full-grown size gave the skull with the huge closed eyes a slightly grotesque smile, but overall the small figure in my hand gave me a solemn feeling. Death does that to me, in even the smallest of shapes. I couldn’t put it back on the pavement, and decided to take it home with me.

You must know that I grew up with a father who also gave anatomy classes at the arts academy. And so I grew up with him putting our smaller pets on aqua fortis, strong water, once they died. Our hamsters, mice, rats, but also the birds we would find outside: he preserved the best specimen, the most beloved ones for us in jars. These were kept in a black leaden glass case. There were also some larger animals; gifts form a befriended vet, like the foetus of a calf and a still-born little pig. They all seemed to float ever so comfortably in their containers for all eternity. I liked looking at the jars and the creatures in it, and preferred this to burying them. They remained close by, and I was able to look at them. This way I did not really have to give them up. It was all completely normal for me, something I grew up with. It was only later I noticed that other people thought it rather strange to keep dead animals in glass jars, or in the freezer next to the fish fingers (in a plastic bag, of course).

So I found this little bird, and I took it home with me – making sure to keep the dog far from it, who was curious and wanted to gobble it up – and put it in the freezer. Again, in a little plastic bag. I washed my hands carefully afterwards; hygiene is very important when handling dead animals. When I was about 11 years old, my father taught me how to do this myself, how to preserve animals. He showed me to make strong water, but since then I haven’t been doing it a lot and so I googled to find some sort of reference for the doses of the ingredients:. I didn’t remember my father being very specific about the amounts, but I figured I could easily check this. The first site I clicked on gave a lot of information, but not what I was looking for. And then, as I scrolled down, I came across this request, posted April 2009. It hit me hard:

Can anyone help me?

Today I lost my baby after 9 weeks of pregnancy because of a miscarriage.

Because the baby looks so beautiful, I want to put it on strong water for a while.

Can anyone please help me with this, as soon as possible?

(to be continued)